Diary

Jennifer
Kanetsky

Past Entries

November 24, 2003

Without a meet to focus on this weekend, the last week of training was challenging for most of us. On Monday, however, Jon announced the Miami Invitational squad, consisting of about half of the team, which got a little taste of taper the week before.

The Miami group gets to rest for the Invite on Dec. 5-7 to try and make national qualifying cuts earlier in the season. It can really make me jealous that I am swimming a 2,000-yard butterfly set in the middle of practice while the taper group only does 2,000 yards of practice in total. But the situation will be flip flopped next semester when I am tapering for UAA's and they have to do 7,500 yards.

Despite the occasional twinge of jealousy, there are no hard feelings on the team and we are all very supportive of each other. With everyone swimming so fast already this semester, it will be very exciting to see how fast we swim tapered in a few weeks! It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it!

Even though we didn't have a meet, last weekend did prove to be quite eventful. Firstly, Saturday morning practices are usually long course, but the coaches decided to let us swim short course so that we could do a lot of race-type swimming off the blocks.

Impressively, many people were able to go in-season best times or even lifetime best times in practice! Props to sprinter Hillary Lane who went her lifetime best in the 200-yard freestyle…you are amazing!

The highlight of practice, of course, was when three people were able to meet or surpass the "Get-out-swim" time standards set by the coaches so that our whole team was able to warm down instead swimming another set.

Later that day, many of us came back to the Woodruff P.E. Center to support our volleyball team who ended up defeating Williams College, thus advancing to the NCAA final four in two weeks! It is the first time in school history that they had played in the NCAA quarterfinals, so it goes without saying that advancing to the final four is pretty remarkable. If you ever get the chance to go watch some good volleyball teams play, I highly recommend it. It's very exciting!

After the volleyball match, I headed over to Coach Jessica Berkowitz's (or should I say Jessica Minnier's?) wedding reception with my roommates. Jessica, or Berko as we call her, was married last month in Cancun, but because none of us could make the wedding, she and her husband threw a reception party here in Altanta. It was a lot of fun and Berko looked absolutely beautiful all dolled up in her wedding gown.

When I left the reception, the night was still young but I was tired and didn't feel like doing very much except maybe going to sleep. Because I have good friends like Jessie Burley, Brian Seymour, and Matt Schreiber, however, they wouldn't let me do any such thing on a Saturday night. They kidnapped me and dragged me off to the Havana Club in Buckhead where we met up with alumni David Hiller and Daniel Silverfield ('03) and several of our other teammates. We all did some serious salsa dancing, so much so that today my feet are killing me. And honestly, when Leigh, Julia, Dinsmore, Tory, Ryder, Press, Halstead, and Jimmy are all there, how can you not have a great time?!

Right now, we are all looking forward to Thanksgiving this week and eating until we can't eat anymore. Before I can truly entertain that thought, however, I need to write a term paper. See you next time!

Jennifer Kanetsky is a senior from Willoughby, Ohio. She would love to answer e-mail questions from Emory recruits and fans.